The Draft: Rogue John John Juniper Ale

Stick to beer, and the worst thing you’ll get is a healthy gut, but mess around with gin, and you’ll be tossing your babies aside for booze before you know it. At least, that was the feeling in eighteenth-century England judging by William Hogarth’s liquor-soaked spot-the-difference"Beer Street and Gin Lane." These days, the tables have turned: the artisanal tide has given us highfalutin micro-distilled gin and beer dangerous enough to make you forget your kids at soccer practice.

Rogue spotted the trend a mile out, and added a distillery to their 22-year-old craft brewery in 2003. (Anchor, the original craft beer, was first to the gin game too—they started a distillery in 1993.) Rogue Spirits makes three rums, a whiskey, and two gins, then gives the used barrels to the brewery for aging beer. Whisky-barrel-aged beer is nothing new, but gin-barrel-aged beer is, if only because gin barrels are so so hard to come by. Who ages gin? Rogue does. They use local Oregon pinot noir barrels to age their pink spruce gin, then use those same barrels to store John John Juniper, an incredibly good—and very weird—pale ale.

I was skeptical at first, after several terrible experiences with sahti, a Finnish beer made with juniper and rye. But John John (named for John "More Hops" Maier, Rogue’s brewmaster and distiller John Couchot) balances the fruit with heavy notes of lemon and grapefruit, pine, and even black pepper. Rogue’s is a complex gin, made with 14 ingredients, and the added pinot barrel flavor only excites the taste buds more. The beer is awesome—as refreshing as a classic, west-coast, citrussy pale, but with enough strong flavors to hold its own in a cocktail. A John John and gin boilermaker? Just make sure to keep an eye on your kids.

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